How Many School Leavers Will The NHS Employ In 2025? All Of Them.

Phil Smith has a question for anyone wondering about the next boom area for technology.

How many of Britain’s school leavers will the National Health Service need to employ within 12 years if fundamental change is not introduced to the way the organisation is run?

"Every single one of them," is the answer that the chief executive of
Cisco Systems for the UK and Ireland came up with when his company ran some research into the subject.

The calculation has left Smith, a Scot who has been working for Cisco since 1994, when it only employed ten people in Britain, convinced that healthcare will become one of the major battlefields for technology.

"The health system, as we all know, is struggling," he says. "It's struggling to be funded effectively and to scale to the level it's going to have to scale to."

"If you consider the current population and the rate it is ageing at, there's going to be a much greater demand for healthcare and assisted living capability over the next number of years.

"The cost of healthcare is increasing continuously and therefore the model probably has to change."

Cisco employs 5,000 staff at 12 locations in the UK and Ireland, including 2,500 at its UK head office in Feltham, Berkshire. More than half of the total workforce is involved in research and development.

Mr Smith says the NHS research was carried out by Cisco to support its view that healthcare technology is a major business opportunity in the UK.

"We did a calculation of how you would actually resource the health service if you just extrapolate today's model until 2025," he says.

"Assuming you have the same nurses, doctors and clinicians working in hospitals and those hospitals carry on doing medicine in the way they do it today, we predict that by 2025 every school leaver in Britain would have to work for the NHS.

"That's purely because of the way the model works today. So the extrapolation of that says that you have to change the model because clearly every school leaver in Britain isn't going to work for the NHS."

Mr Smith is also non-executive chairman of the Government's Technology Strategy Board (TSB), which has several pilot programmes enabling a much greater use of technology within the NHS.

One scheme involving 6,000 British homes is assessing the potential of technological innovations to enable elderly people to stay longer on assisted living programmes, relieving some of the pressure on residential care provision.

Another is assessing whether 3D scanning technology can be used to monitor the development of bed sores among hospital patients - a task that is currently extremely labour-intensive.

The buzz phrase “the internet of things” is increasingly being used to reflect a world where all manner of domestic machines are connected to the internet.

However, Mr Smith says Cisco's vision is of an “internet of everything” that also transforms the provision of public and private sector services.

“Less than 1pc of everything that could be connected to the internet is actually connected to it,” he says. “In the UK there’s potentially more than $50bn of capability that companies can extract by exploiting a much more connected supply chain and dealing with their customers and people.

"Health is one of the more obvious areas. You can put in technological enablement, whether it's continuous monitoring of body and life signs, such as heart rate or blood pressure, the ability to use video to consult with your doctor or sophisticated technological methods for monitoring patients in hospitals?

"That kind of continuous connection, that much more sophisticated way of connecting health together, could potentially reduce significant costs and also make the health service more efficient.”

What do you think? What’s your vision for the National Health Service of the future?